


Strange Treasure

by Bakcheia



Category: Bacchae - Euripides
Genre: Crossdressing, Dolphins for all, God Shenanigans, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21789259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakcheia/pseuds/Bakcheia
Summary: In which it's really better if the gods don't notice you at all.
Relationships: Dionysus/Pentheus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Strange Treasure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ohmyvalar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyvalar/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I had a great time writing for you and I hope you enjoy your gift! Thank you for requesting this incredible play!

Pentheus is only six when trouble first comes to his family and he is not old enough yet to understand it properly, nor old enough for people to care to explain it to him. He know this much; that his Aunt Semele has become pregnant and claims Zeus for a father, that Cadmus, normally slow to anger, had beaten her with his staff and broken one of her teeth and that none of the family are speaking to her. She is defiant and wears her finest clothes and combs her hair every day with scented oil, going before her father to demand a sacrifice of gratitude to Zeus and one of consolation to Hera. Pentheus is present at one of these occasions, playing with a little painted bull at the feet of his grandfather’s throne. Cadmus will not speak to her, or even acknowledge her presence but Pentheus takes up his bull and follows her out to the courtyard.

It is a pretty place, heavy with vines and the scent of flowers. Cadmus had made it specially for her; she had used to be his favourite.

His aunt raises her head as he comes to her and pulls him on to her lap, against the swollen, struggling curve of her belly. Her cheeks are wet.

“You believe me, don’t you, Pentheus?” her lips struggle to form a smile against his hair. Pentheus nods, seriously; he knows his aunt for a truthful woman and at his age the gods are very real and near to him. He places a reverent hand on her stomach, feels the little god inside her kick out.

“He knows you for his cousin” Aunt Semele smiles more easily now, “Just think, Pentheus, you are cousin to a god, you have Zeus himself for your uncle.”

His hand on her stomach turns proprietary. His cousin, a god’s son, and he almost a nephew to Zeus. While he is a boy he will have a half god for a playmate and when he is made king, that same half god will be his subject. He doesn’t understand why there isn’t more rejoicing, why his own mother, who is by her sister’s choices now blood related to Zeus himself avoids her whenever she can and speaks coldly to her when she cannot.

Semele is never alone again with him after that. He thinks maybe his mother has warned her off. She keeps mostly to her rooms and each time Pentheus sees her she is thinner, with new lines in her face, mouth a furious, hard line. By the time the baby is ready to be born she is almost a skeleton, save for the heavy bulge of the infant. Her eyes burn all the time with a black fire that he shrinks from; Cadmus no longer looks through her, instead his eyes drop from hers as if he is ashamed of something.

The baby is born in the spring. Pentheus wants to see and has been counting the days till the birth of his god-cousin, but of course he is not permitted to enter the birthing chamber. He wanders about, restless, hears snatches of gossip. The baby is just a baby. The baby has the same blonde hair as a travelling peddler that Semele had once favoured with her custom and who had given her a blue-veined hyacinth for nothing. They had known all along. Someone had bet an inlaid bronze armband against an abalone necklace and the owner of the necklace was refusing to give it up, saying it was a joke, that they had never believed and the bet wasn’t valid.

Pentheus creeps away, troubled, and finds a comfy spot behind a pillar outside his aunt’s room. No one misses him in the fuss, and after a while his mother leaves the room, followed by the rest of his aunts save Semele herself. Ino seems to have been crying but the rest of them wear a look of cold triumph that Pentheus does not like. He is a patient boy, determined to one day be the greatest hunter in the acropolis as well as its king and he is well able to wait until it is dark and no one has entered or left for some time before trying the latch. At one point as he waits he hears crying, but it is a woman’s voice and not a baby’s and it does not last long.

He had been wrong about the room being empty. No one has bothered to light any of the oil lamps and his Aunt is a flat, still shape sleeping upon her bed but Pentheus has eyes only for the cradle and the man leaning over it

Even from behind Pentheus feels that he is the most beautiful man he has ever seen, could ever see and yet he shrinks from him as he would from a horror, as if his curling hair were a nest of snakes or his red mouth filled with blood. There is a fat bunch of grapes in the man's hand; the room is filled with the heady, heavy scent of them, like the bursting of a dozen barrels of wine. The baby in the cradle is reaching for them and laughing. The baby is too young to laugh, too young to be plucking the swollen grapes with agile fingers and stuffing them in its toothless, smiling mouth. Its swaddling cloths lie in a pool around it.

The man laughs back, dropping the grapes carelessly in the cradle, then straightens, gilt hair swinging across the top of his shining shoulders. In his other hand he holds a pipe and Pentheus hates the sight of it. Some animal instinct makes him cover his ears as the man raises the pipe to his lips, but it is unnecessary; the pipe makes no sound that he can hear.

It wakes his aunt though, as the laughter of her baby has not and she rises silently from the bed. Her face is very white and set and she has eyes for no one but the piper, not for Pentheus nor for her laughing, wine stained baby. She is wearing her best dress, with the gold thread and woven border of dancing cranes, her dress that is only worn to grand festivities and kept folded in a cedar chest all the rest of the year.

The god - for what else could he be? - turns to her and he does not smile at her like he did upon her son but she goes to him anyway, ready to follow him from the room as if he were a trusted relative or beloved chaperone; her feet shuffle to the shifting rhythms of the music which is not for Pentheus to hear, her ringlets of hair swing and toss about her closed, empty face. 

He wants to run but his muscles have become the meat of some other creature and hold him in his sheltered corner. Neither his aunt nor the god turn to look at him as they pass and he is caught in terror between the stumbling figure before him and the still shape that remains behind, with white foam upon its lips and three drops of blood staining the collar of the priceless dress. It is long moments before he can make himself crawl to the window - on all fours, like a dog - and watch the slow procession that creeps and sways through the streets of the city and up towards the mountain, solemn shadows that dwindle to nothing in the dusk.

The baby starts wailing. Maybe it knows that its mother is dead and that the god has left it behind. Maybe it is just hungry, or cold but Pentheus finds that what he could not do for his own sake he can do for his little cousin, more helpless than him for all his supposed divinity, he can pass the bed with its silent, staring occupant, tall on his own two sturdy legs and swing the bawling little thing into his arms.

The baby in the cot is not as he has remembered it, with trailing hair and juice stained lips; the screwed up face is clean now and the limbs neatly swaddled but when he picks it up to rock and kiss it, the fat round cheeks taste of wine. Pentheus will be king one day but he is a child tonight, so he takes his cousin and runs from the room, runs from the smell of wine and the song of the silent piper. Runs from the memory of his aunt climbing towards the distant mountain, and away from her crumpled body on the bed. Runs towards his mother, who will comfort him and laugh at his fears and call him brave and only weep for her sister long after he is soundly asleep in her bed.

The midwife is given a hefty bribe to empty a jar of lambs blood between the rigid legs of the corpse and keep her lips shut about the empty kylix with its sickly smelling dregs of unwatered wine. The child lives out the week and is named Dionysus and given to a wet-nurse and Pentheus sees nothing of him for several years but he does not quite forget the god with the pipe, or his aunt’s empty face, or the baby’s laughing one. Sometimes when he licks his lips, he thinks he can still taste the juice of those strange grapes.

*** * ***

Dionysus is not the only bastard child in the palace but he is the only one whom Cadmus treats as a grandson. Maybe it is for the sake of his dead favourite, or from guilt, but very likely it is Dionysus himself who earns it. Nearly everyone loves him, even Pentheus’s mother Agave who had been so cruel during her sister’s pregnancy. This makes it much easier for them to be friends.

They meet for the second time when Dionysus is four, wandering the palace halls after escaping his nurse. He has been kept with the servants all this time but still he seems to know Pentheus and greets him with raised arms and a cry of “Cousin!”

Pentheus is enchanted with this confidence and normally indifferent to children - though he is no more than ten himself – takes Dionysus back to his rooms and gives him his old toys, the painted bull and a team of red glazed ceramic horses with reins of real leather that can be pulled along on wheels. Dionysus takes them politely, but it is Pentheus himself he wants, clinging to his legs with plump arms and begging to be tossed in the air, or for Pentheus to get down on his knees and let himself be steered about by tugs on his hair like a pony. Dionysus calls this game ‘leopard’ and it is a clear favourite.

There are two near Dionysus's own age, twins, the son of Pentheus’s uncle Polydouros. Their mother is a peach skinned lower servant, of mostly Cretan birth, who speaks Greek only haltingly and raises her sons to be hard working and respectful. It is not her fault that they are cruel and jealous of their cousin’s natural superiority and better treatment. Certainly she does her best to prevent their mischief but she is one of those soft hearted mothers who will not whip their children, so they do not fear her anger, or at least their fear is less than their resentment at Dionysus's petting.

At first they make the mistake of bullying him openly, secure in the knowledge of their royal father and Pentheus has all the satisfaction of catching them at it and scruffing them like two puppies, lifting them almost off the ground. After that they become more cunning and it is salt is Dionysus's milk and the leather reins burnt off the little horses, the horns broken off his bright bull. Their guilt is rarely something that can be proved but as there is always new milk from his nurse, or cunning toys from Cadmus and Pentheus himself of course, who always has time for him and is better than any toy, he doesn't seem to mind too much.

One day he takes a fancy that he must see the ocean and nothing will please him but that Pentheus alone must take him down, riding double on a sturdy mountain pony with a stiff mane that he may twist his hands in, his cousin's strong arms keeping him securely on the broad, bare back. 

The sea that flicks at their feet is dark and hot with summer. Pentheus can hear the click and whistle of dolphins at play, see the splash of their silvery bodies as they leap, unusually close to the shore. He crouches in the damp sand and builds little castles for Dionysus to kick over, then lies full stretch and pretends to be asleep so he can be buried. When they leave he forces the pony breast deep in the water so the sand is washed from between their toes before the long ride back. It is a good day.

The black haired, black eyed, bastard twins of Polydouros are not at dinner that night, nor at breakfast the next morning. A search party party finds a soaked, salty chiton at the edge of the sea and their servant mother’s grief can be heard through the halls for three days. Cadmus gives her a gold ring, heavily worked and she takes the hint and stops her wailing but Pentheus never sees her smile again, either.

All that summer it is Dionysus’s delight to go down to the shore and stand waist deep in the waters, while the pair of dolphins gambol around him and let him stroke their wet grey faces. Pentheus always accompanies him on these trips; they neither of them can swim but Pentheus has a foot of height on his young cousin and a youth’s confidence in his own abilities. He imagines a great wave coming and lifting Dionysus’s slight weight with it and he, Pentheus, striding out, heavy and unmovable as stone to pluck him from the sucking waters. He thinks of his cousin’s warm, wet arms twining trustingly about his neck. Such a wave never comes and eventually the dolphins leave the shore and Dionysus loses interest and returns to his haunts of palace and plains. Dionysus never learns to fear the sea. He never learns to fear anything.

Pentheus pretends to be the same, trains hard and feels the muscles building strong in his back and thighs, sees his beard grow in thick and dark. He does not forget the silent piper, leading his aunt away up the mountain. Often he wakes sweating in the night, hearing the sound of pipes and knowing them, even though they had been silent to him all those years ago. Sometimes, when he is hunting on the plains below the mountain he drinks from the brooks there and the clear water tastes of old wine.

Once he takes Dionysus to see the palace bull, taller than the greatest warhorse in the stable and easily twice the weight; wickedly tempered and wickedly horned. He wants to impress his cousin, a harder task with every passing day and runs through the bull pen, vaulting out a scant foot ahead of the insulted beast. Dionysus watches with his hands over his mouth, eyes gratifyingly wide but Pentheus in not even given time to catch his breath before Dionysus is inside the pen himself, the great white head of the bull nestled like a bird in his hands. It stands, letting itself be fondled with half closed eyes and before Pentheus can stop him he is mounted, sitting astride the bull’s sweating back and laughing at the horror on his cousin's face. Still laughing he digs his bare heels into the pale hide and the animal breaks into a lumbering trot round the perimeter of the fence as if it had always been trained to carry a rider.

“He’s beautiful” Dionysus states, from his towering, snorting seat. “We should sacrifice him at the maimakterion.”

By the time Dionysus is fourteen years old it has become absurd that he is housed with the servants while treated as family by the king and royalty by his nurse and he is moved into his mother’s rooms, that no one else had wanted to claim. He has no official status, and nothing in the way of income but what the patronage of the ailing Cadmus cannot get him the love of Pentheus invariably will.

It is Pentheus people turn to these days, if they need something organised, or permission given. Cadmus rules in name alone, keeping to his bedroom and the company of his physicians and Pentheus sits in the great chair in the hall as if he is already king. He still cringes at the sound of pipes, always giving the most generous of gifts to the kitharists and the lyricists but turning his face away from the pipers. Yet Dionysus loves them better that all else and beguiles them back into the halls with smiles and soft words. They are all of them poor men and surely feel the lack of Pentheus's more practical forms of payment but not a one of them moves on to richer cities.

Pentheus permits him this little opposition with a smile; at first it is the gentle tolerance of the elder for the younger, later it is because he wants to watch Dionysus dance. Dionysus is old enough now for a man’s cut but he refuses it and his gold hair tumbles down his back in a fall of incalculable worth, glittering bright as the threads on his mother’s festive dress. Pentheus mocks him for it, orders him to cut it and is glad to be ignored.

On a night when his dancing is especially splendid a gaggle of palace women rise from their seats, letting their spindles clatter anyhow to the floor, heedless of snarling their work or snapping their distaffs and begin dancing with him. Pentheus’s sister Epeiros is foremost amongst them, giving shrill, odd cries, and stamping her white feet.

It is a scandal and Pentheus puts a stop to it at once. They obey, of course, pulling veils across their panting breasts and lowering their eyes but Pentheus becomes accustomed to walking into rooms and being greeted with sudden stillness and flushed faces. He has never had much time for his sister and now she avoids him entirely; when they sit in the great hall together her eyes pass through him as though he is no more that a shade, as Cadmus’s eyes had passed over their aunt all those years ago. Her spindle lies idle in her hands or else she beats it on her thigh in the rhythm of the dances Pentheus has forbidden her.

Cadmus abdicates the throne and Pentheus becomes King at twenty one, chosen over his uncle Polydourus, whom he has banished at Dionysus’s request. He looks well in the crown and is not prone to the fits of temper that had caused Polydouros to be passed over, so his authority goes largely unquestioned and his will unchallenged - save where it clashes with that of Dionysus and there he is willing to give way. The halls are always filled with the shrill music of pipes, for nothing pleases his cousin better and so Pentheus spends all the time he can spare hunting on the plains outside of the city.

He does not hunt upon the mountain although some of the best game is there and Pentheus is a more than capable hunter, able to kill a boar without a net, long spear braced. Dionysus on the other hand is fascinated with it and uses his most enticing ways to persuade Pentheus to take him at least to the lower peaks, where the bare bones of the mountain begin to press through the grass. It is the one thing Pentheus is able to deny him. Once he is old enough, however, he begins to go alone and then it is Pentheus who must try to charm him away with other amusements. He is rarely successful.

Sometimes, when Dionysus is particularly lovely, or Pentheus particularly weak he goes with him as far as the beginning slopes, provided they cut across the fields and avoid the road. One night, when Dionysus is seventeen and he twenty three he pulls them down into the grass at the black foot of the mountain and Dionysus lets him, laughing. In his best moods he likes to pretend that Pentheus is the stronger.

They lie with their shoulders together in the coarse mountain hay and Dionysus traces star shapes with his finger, murmuring the names of constellations into Pentheus’s ear. He finds the twin stars of Castor and Pollux, his half brothers, Orion his cousin- a greater hunter even than Pentheus was with a great sword slung at his belt, Asclepius the serpent bearer - another half brother. Pentheus looks up at the endless sky and feels small until Dionysus presses a kiss to his cheek and reminds him that they are also his cousins and half cousins.

When it grows late enough to become cold Pentheus pulls them both to their feet and stands for a moment under the massing glitter of their relations, face nuzzled in Dionysus’s silken curling hair, that is like his own in texture, if not length or colour. Dionysus permits it all, letting himself be held like a fragile thing but when Pentheus puts an arm around his shoulders and tries to lead him back he springs away, laughing, with wild eyes, and there is a jeering tone to the laughter that follows Pentheus on his long walk home.

That night he dreams again of his aunt’s slow journey, that takes him through dark fields and woods, unseen by all but the wild things and the unblinking yellow eyes of goats, the piper always dancing ahead on his winged feet. The music - the last music he will ever hear - leads him onwards and upwards, the mountain thrusting up through the black soil pulls him ever closer to the infinite gape of the sky and he knows, with an old, old knowledge that no matter how many ages pass, no matter how many gods come and go in the minds and hearts of their worshipers, he will never be allowed to come down again.

When he wakes in the morning he feels drunk and it takes half the day for his step to become steady. His mouth never quite clears of the taste of wine.

*** * ***

Dionysus is preparing to go up to the mountain again tonight. Pentheus has forbidden it, as he has forbidden pipes, and the women dancing and Dionysus’s own long golden hair. His very mother is laughing at him, probably even now pinning up her skirts and winding ivy round her stately silvered head.

“Don’t go,” he commands from the doorway, hoping it doesn’t sound like he is begging, knowing that it does.

Dionysus turns to him, and Pentheus knows his lovely face and his smiling red lips and every curl of his golden hair but he does not know his eyes, for tonight they are full of fire.

“Come with me,” he says laughing. It is an invitation Pentheus has received and turned down many a time and yet tonight seems different somehow. His tongue, swollen and thick in his dry mouth, struggles against an assent. He would give his cousin very nearly anything, but not this.

“My boarhound’s litter are old enough to be tried” he offers instead, “we can take them out on the lower slopes and you can have the best of them for your own.”

“Even the white one, with the blue eyes?” If Dionysus comes with him now, Pentheus will give him his white puppy and his matched chestnut horses and all the devotion he owes to his city.

Dionysus catches his lip between his teeth and pretends to consider.

“Come, come, we are all waiting for you” It is his sister, Epeiros. She has caught a pair of the little house snakes and tangled them in her unbound hair. A mottled leopard skin covers her waist to knee and both breasts are exposed. For a moment Pentheus is shocked from his dream, he turns to his cousin to share his outrage but Dionysus has already risen in welcome, his hands held out and she takes them, laughing, and lets him twirl her about so that her skins fly up and show that she is bare underneath.

Outside in the corridor there is the _scuff scuff scuff_ of many feet and women’s voices, laughing. One of them gives a high, wailing cry and one by one they all take it up until Pentheus’s head rings and he is forced to his knees.

Dionysus pauses in the doorway and looks down on him with a memory of fondness.

“Come with me,” he says, again, and then Pentheus is where had promised himself he would never be again; alone in his aunt’s bedroom with the night pressing in around him. Here is the place where the cradle once sat, here the place the god had stood, the floor covered now with the skin of the palace bull that Dionysus had once ridden. And here is his aunt’s deathbed, the linens stirred about from where Dionysus has flung himself upon it. Pentheus crosses to it, stumbling as if drunk though he has had nothing but water for weeks, and presses his face to the rumpled sheets. They smell of wine and of damp black earth and growing things.

The pipes draw him to the window; he can see the procession moving up towards the mountain. He knows by the movement of the torches that the bearers must be dancing and he knows, even though he cannot see, that the foremost figure is Dionysus. At the tail of the procession is another figure, he carries no torch and is almost lost in the night. Pentheus knows who he is, also.

The music from his pipe makes him long to dance. He takes two shuffling, awkward steps; he is not dressed for dancing. The thick stupor in his head turns golden, like boiled honey. This is a celebration and his beard is uncombed, his clothes rough and common. What was he thinking, as he dressed that morning? He sits at his cousin’s carved olive wood table and experiments with dabs of green malachite paste and pots of rouge compounded of crushed mulberries and ochre, admiring the effect in a little circle of polished silver kept there for the purpose. It had cost him more than a yearling horse, but Dionysus had wanted it and it had made him feel rich to give it.

When he is satisfied with the effect he crosses to the cedar chest which aside from the bed is the only thing of his mother’s that Dionysus has seen fit to keep. The gold thread is still bright on the festal dress, too costly to have been burned with her, too unlucky for any of her sisters to claim. It smells of the bay leaves it has been stored with to keep the moths away and slips on easily over his head. He pins it with the lion head brooch that had fastened his cloak. He is too warm to need it, anyway.

He tries the dainty sandals on his feet, but they are too small and he will dance better without them. The movements come more naturally to him now, as he had thought they might, now he is better dressed for the occasion. His hair is too short to toss as he would like but he imagines it long, like his cousin’s, or his sister’s and soon he can feel the slap of its weight across his shoulders.

And now, out of the Cadmeia and into stinging night air, through the city that throbs with music and dangles with ivy, drumming with the pounding of women’s feet. At one point a man, his face streaming with blood, clutches the hem of his dress and begs him _my king, my king,_ but Pentheus brushes him aside. He is not the king tonight. The man’s wails follow him out of the city - _I whipped her and she went anyway, please my king, she was always a good woman before the god came._ Pentheus pays no more heed to him than to the stones that cut into his bare feet.

The torches and pipes of the bacchantes have passed out of sight and hearing, but the music from one is still clear to him and he understands now that the god is not at the rear of Dionysus’s procession, but at the head of his.

So what is he to do but follow it, up towards the mountain with its many lights, along the self same path that Hermes Khthonia had led his aunt all those years ago, dancing to the music that was finally for him, up into the grove of trees where his cousin and the dead god are waiting.


End file.
